mismatch between apps & data centre network

• Many proposals for software-based routers and switches

– e.g. RouteBricks , ServerSwitch, PacketShader, SideCar, NetMap,…

• Replace traditional, application-agnostic network services

• e.g. IPv4 forwarding, deep packet inspection, firewalls• Why don’t use them to implement application-specific

services?

Mismatch between Apps & Data Centre Network

• Oversubscription: Fat-tree [SIGCOMM’08], VL2 [SIGCOMM’09], …• Path collision: Hedera [NSDI’10], MPTCP [SIGCOMM’11], SPAIN [NSDI’10], …• TCP Incast: DCTCP [SIGCOMM’10], ICTCP [CoNEXT’10], …• Traffic prioritisation: Orchestra [SIGCOMM’11], D2TCP [SIGCOMM’11], …• Fair sharing: Seawall [NSDI’11], FairCloud [SIGCOMM’12], …

1

Treating symptoms rather than cause...

• Abstraction

• Reality

Peter Pietzuch (Imperial College London)

EPSRC NaaS Project: Network-as-a-Service

• Switches augmented with processing capabilities (NaaS box)

– Applications deploy processing functions on each device– Permits applications to adapt network flows based on

requirements• Initial use case: on-path data aggregation for Hadoop

– Other use cases: content-based routing, in-network caching, ...• Research challenges: performance, isolation,

programming model

2Peter Pietzuch (Imperial College London)